Scaling Our Private Portals with Open edX and Docker

Open edX reads configurations from JSON files stored in the server, and each instance must keep these files synchronized..While we were able to overcome these in a large single deployment, they would be much harder to manage for our new offering, the Cognitive Class Private Portals..Cognitive Class for business When presenting to other companies, we often hear the same question: “how can I make this content available to my employees?“..That was the main motivation behind our Private Portals offer..A Private Portal represents a dedicated deployment created specifically for a client..From a technical perspective, this new offering would require us to spin up new deployments quickly and on-demand..Going back to the points highlighted earlier, numbers two and three are especially challenging as the number of deployments grows..Creating and configuring a new VM for each deployment is a slow and costly process..And if a particular Portal outgrows its resources, we would have to find a way to scale it and manage its configuration across multiple VMs..Enter Docker At the same time, we were experiencing a similar demand in our Virtual Labs infrastructure, where the use of hundreds of VMs was becoming unbearable..The team started to investigate and implement a solution based on Docker..The main benefits of Docker for us were twofold: Increase server usage density; Isolate services processes and files from each other.. More details